The moaning in the room next to me starts low, guttural. At first I ignore it, remaining focused on my newspaper. Then the pitch changes; it becomes sharper, louder, and I can’t concentrate any longer. My body tenses. I remember when someone has dug into my Achilles tendon or ITB. She Runs to Reclaim Her Identity After Assault.
A moment later, a long-haired, bearded man sporting granny glasses emerges from the room. Patrick Harestad is a board-certified structural integration therapist in Arcata, California, and I’m sitting in his waiting area. He leaves the door ajar, so I can see the man inside attempting a downward-facing dog. Japanese-themed tattoos cover about a quarter of Ken Young’s 74-year-old body; otherwise, he’s wearing only threadbare early 1980s running shorts.
“How’s he doing?” I ask Harestad.
“He’s beaten himself up pretty bad,” he says. “On the other hand, he’s in mind-blowing shape for someone who has run almost 140,000 miles.”
After a blissful, post-torture relaxation, Young joins us. He’s 5-foot-8 and 137 pounds with wispy white hair, a matching mustache, wire-rim glasses, and a somewhat unfocused gaze. He pulls on blue jeans, a road-race T-shirt, and Teva sandals, and threads his shoulder-length ponytail through the back of a running cap, exposing clumps of dirt under his fingernails. He’s been wrist-deep in his gardens recently.
Every two weeks, Young makes the three- to four-hour round trip from his home in Petrolia to Arcata, a modest college town about 280 miles north of San Francisco. His appointment with Harestad is key, but he won’t make the long drive for just one purpose. Young multitasks throughout his waking hours because “doing one thing at a time is a waste of time and energy.” So each trip to Arcata also includes a quick visit to a natural foods store to buy fresh liver (for his cats) and a cruise through Costco. Not a moment is frittered away; not an extra mile is driven. He executes forays based on logistics and analysis. “The world is full of so much chaos, and I’m a born planner, an organizer,” he says. “I try to make sense out of things and look for an underlying structure.”
This innate drive for order, precision, and accuracy, combined with his passion for running, has made Young the undisputed king of road-race statistics. It’s a field he essentially invented 45 years ago, and he’s still the leader, still the hardest-working, still the most nit-picking, and still trying to impose exactitude on a sport that has mushroomed wildly during his lifetime. Young is to road racing what Bill James is to baseball and Nate Silver is to presidential elections. He’s the Big-Data guy.
If Ken Young did not exist, running would have to invent him or it would have little history—a foundational leg of all major sports. Who was better, Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus? Who averaged more points per game, Wilt Chamberlain, Michael Jordan, or LeBron James? Which tennis tournament attracts the best players, Wimbledon or the U.S. Open? Such questions and debates pervade sports, adding intrigue and passion (and bar fights) and demanding compendia to provide answers. In running, only Young and his Association of Road Racing Statisticians, arrs.run, have the answers.
Over the last 40-some years, Young has spent 55 to 60 hours a week sorting through road, track, cross-country, and trail-race data, and organizing it with a software program he wrote specifically for the task. At first, he worked nights and weekends around his job as a college professor; since retiring two decades ago, the task consumes most of his waking hours. If he had been paid a modest $25 an hour for his running-stat labors, this would amount to about $3 million. He hasn’t received a cent.
Young inputs data to his computer only after he has satisfied himself as to which runner ran what race in what time. This process doesn’t optimize speed or size—it optimizes accuracy. Young manually enters about 2,000 new results a week, gathering the basic info from ARRS members, some elite runners, and about 150 global correspondents. He then checks for anomalies, not just in spelling and runner identification, but also in gun and net times, in event dates, and in the distance between a race’s start and finish lines. “I’ve worked with Ken for almost 40 years, and he has always used the best science in his record-keeping,” says Marty Post, a former Runner’s World statistician and current statistician for the World Marathon Majors. “His methods have a single goal: to ensure the integrity of top performances.”
The ARRS website attracts about 2,000 users a week, most of them leaders in the running community and insiders who have a huge influence in the sport.
“I use the site for checking U.S. road records,” says Toni Reavis, the well-known TV commentator and blogger. “It’s always updated promptly—and accurately.”
When it comes to scrutinizing his data, Young tracks a few trends: more women runners, more adventure races and half marathons, more slow runners. But he doesn’t have time to look for emerging trends or evaluate changes in the running scene over time. He really only cares about the fastest runners out there.
All About 75 Hard in Rochester, New York, grew up in South Pasadena, California, and graduated from North High School in Phoenix, Arizona. From an early age, he proved smarter than his peers, and far more obstreperous. When his second-grade teacher told his class that larger numbers couldn’t be subtracted from smaller ones, Young disagreed. “Even then I could imagine negative numbers,” he recalls. “I decided she was an idiot, so I stopped taking her seriously.” A few years later, he committed himself to misspelling all 20 words on the weekly test, just to make a point about how ridiculous he felt the test was. In high school, he finally encountered a “useful” teacher—one who played chess with Young before his first class, sometimes making the incoming students wait until the pair had finished their game.
In college, Young bombed out of ROTC several times in an era when it was required at land-grant colleges. Not one for taking orders, he hated dress codes, formations, and looking like everyone else. “I’d like to think that the first word out of my mouth was, ‘Why?’” he says. “That kind of attitude doesn’t go over well in the military.”
What he loved was meteorology. He had been studying weather maps since his early teens, when he subscribed to a publication of working weather maps from the National Weather Service. Not content to simply study weather, he delighted in rearranging the data, looking for seasonal patterns in rainfall, storms, and the like. He received a B.S. in chemistry from Arizona State University in 1965, and in 1973 earned a Ph.D. in geophysics with a minor in statistics from the University of Chicago.
As a kid, he’d also loved running—he’d run a 10:10 two-mile in high school—but quit after his first college cross-country season because of a heavy course load. His hiatus ended in the late 1960s after he read Dr. Ken Cooper’s pioneering Aerobics. More than preaching the health benefits of running, the book contained tables and points to measure one’s progress. For a hypercompetitive math nerd, the approach was irresistible, and before long Young was racking up points fast. In 1971, he began a daily running streak of at least one mile a day (it lasted 15,179 days, or 41 years and 204 days); in 1972, he recorded a one-time world amateur record for the indoor marathon (2:35:52) and set an American record for 40 miles on the track that still stands (4:08:31; 6:12 pace); and in 1974, he ran his marathon best in Boston (2:25:46).
While at the University of Chicago, Young joined the school’s track club, where he met influential coach Ted Haydon, twice an assistant U.S. Olympic track-and-field coach. Haydon enjoyed putting on a six-mile handicap race each summer that gave a head start to slower runners, but he wanted a more objective method of assigning handicaps. So one day in 1971, he asked Young for help. Right away, Young realized the solution would be cake if only he had tons of data. So he wrote to Runner’s World, asking an editor friend to forward race results he received. A few weeks later, Young had several cardboard boxes full of printed results. Using keypunch machines, he entered the data onto computer cards, and later wrote a program in Fortran to make sense of all the times and distances and to generate rankings. In effect, he devised “equivalent running performances” of the kind that became widely available on the internet some 30 years later: Who’s faster, a 43:00 10K runner or a 3:17 marathoner? Young figured it out long before anyone else.
As with his running streak, once he started down the running stats path, Young didn’t stop. He never thought to ponder the size of the task or the lack of payment, not to mention the dearth of interest back then. He simply saw something he could fix. “The data was such a mess, and I had a penchant for creating systems,” he says. “I put things in their proper slots. Runner’s World published annual marathon rankings, but I knew there were lots of road races that weren’t marathons. They needed attention, too. One thing just led to another.”
He’s been at it ever since, organizing results, disseminating them in his newsletter, Analytical Distance Runner, that he started in the early 1980s (and puts out 48 times a year), and taking three 10,000-mile “research trips” to large and tiny libraries across the U.S. and Canada to look in their microfilm archives for missing race results. Along the way, he’s been associated with the National Running Data Center and the USATF Long Distance Running Committee, where he was the official record keeper from 1979 to 1988. And he supported the earliest course-certification efforts of Ted Corbitt and all who followed. Without accurate courses, race times mean nothing.
A Part of Hearst Digital Media crew of like-minded statisticians and record keepers banded together as the independent and all-volunteer Association of Road Racing Statisticians. The group has no official standing. It’s simply better at what it does than anyone else. Young likes to say that the ARRS is a “leaderless organization,” the only type he can tolerate. In truth, he’s the group’s brain, central nervous system, and conscience, and well known among an influential group of top runners, race directors, and running media.
“Ken’s a scientist, a runner, a statistician, and a record keeper,” says British colleague Andy Milroy, a founding member of ARRS. “Ken and the ARRS have revolutionized the way road running is tracked, both researching records back 100 and more years, and also going global. Ken is the conduit that keeps the data flowing. ARRS has identified male marathon records from some 210 countries, and female marathon records from more than 180.”
To date, the ARRS database includes more than 1.1 million performances from nearly 214,000 races. What do those performances reveal? World records, of course, for distances from 3K to 24-hour events; single-age records, such as the best half marathon times by a 5-year-old boy (Matthew Feibush, 3:02:58) or an 80-year-old woman (Betty Jean McHugh, 2:04:19); and more than 300 results for Australian great Ron Clarke, who passed away last year. And that’s not even a surface scratch. “Without Ken, we wouldn’t have many of our records,” says Donald Lein, chair of USATF’s masters long-distance running committee. “We wouldn’t know if the new performances were better than the old ones, and we wouldn’t be able to do age-grading [the popular practice that allows comparisons among ages and genders from different race distances]. Both the running community and USATF are in debt to Ken for his years of selfless toil.”
Beyond compiling basic hard data, Young has used his programming skills to build analytical tools that are found only at arrs.run. His Race Time Bias, for instance, ranks the world’s fastest, record-eligible marathon courses based on times recorded on those routes by runners in the ARRS database (those who have run 2:20 or faster for men and 2:50 for women, or other equivalent times). The RTB puts the Paris and Berlin marathons at the top of the world marathon list; Houston ranks 16th overall, first among U.S. courses. Another tool measures “Most Competitive Road Races” of all time, those events that have gathered the strongest fields; the 2013 London Marathon tops that list.
Young, a fanatical believer in the primacy of head-to-head competition, has also devised an innovative Competitive Ranking System for grading runners based on their finishing position within a race. It doesn’t care about a top athlete’s best times or the type of course she ran it on; it only measures where she finishes in direct match-ups with other elite runners. One’s Competitive Point Level, or CPL, varies with time, so an elite can have a CPL for this weekend, a month ago, a year ago, and 10 years ago if she was racing at a high level then.
Here’s how it works: Based on good recent results, a runner—let’s name him “Improving”—makes it into Young’s system and reaches a point level of, say, 2,715. He then runs in a race against “Champion,” who has 2,810 points. If Improving beats Champion, he gains a substantial number of points for his unexpected success. If, however, Champion beats Improving, Champion gets no or few points because he is expected to beat Improving.
Other “rules” affect point exchanges between Improving and Champion. For example, more points are awarded for longer races like marathons because it’s not possible to run many competitive 26.2s. Also, if Champion doesn’t compete for several months, he begins to lose points for inactivity.
Basically, Young’s CPL calculation reduces a race to “Who beat who?” A runner enters an event with a certain CPL, finishes ahead of some and behind others, thereby gaining and losing points, and leaves with a new CPL. There’s a lot of data and an algorithm. Most important, it all makes sense.
Young has recently been compiling data (what else?) on how well his CPL predicts race outcomes. In the first 340 races he examined, with an average of 12 CPL-ranked runners in each, the CPL leader won 45 percent of the time, and finished in the top three 79 percent of the time. Choosing among the 12 runners by chance alone would produce the winner only eight percent of the time.
So if you ever decide to start betting on the outcomes of Olympic or major marathons, head to Young’s website first. In mid-August 2015, Mo Farah and Genzebe Dibaba topped the CPL rankings. At the late-August world championships in Beijing, Farah won both the 5,000- and 10,000-meter races, while Dibaba placed first and third in the 1500 and 5,000, respectively.
After his appointed stops in Arcata, Young drives me the 90 minutes south to his home in Petrolia. I had offered to rent a car, but he scotched the idea. “The road is hazardous and your car will probably overheat before the top of ‘Malfunction Junction,’” he said. “Or you’ll drive off the road because you’re looking at the views.”
Good points. Petrolia is located in the Mattole Valley, 56 miles southwest of Arcata but a nearly two-hour drive, given its location in the heart of California’s Lost Coast. Named for its remoteness, the Lost Coast includes the longest stretch of undeveloped coastline in the contiguous 48 states, and is so far off the nearest interstate that few people have been there. There’s no cable TV, limited cell phone service, and lots of open space between neighbors. The mountainous King Range has thwarted most public-works projects, while providing many (and, yes, dangerous) vistas from the existing potholed roads.
We spend about a half hour climbing and tumbling along the circuitous byways before catching our first view of the Pacific Ocean. This happens on a mile-long stretch with an 18-percent drop that Young calls “The Wall.” To celebrate, he shoves his Subaru Outback into neutral and I feel my back press against the seat, astronaut-like. “Don’t worry,” he assures me, as the speedometer leaps ahead. “We’ve got no cops out here and almost no other cars. If you see two others, that’s a traffic jam.”
Young discovered Petrolia, a community of about 300 people, nearly two decades ago. At the time, he was recently retired from his career at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he’d taught and conducted research since 1974 (and published his 1993 book, The Endless Toil of the Big-Data Guy, about how clouds produce precipitation). He was working in Sacramento, and one afternoon, following a major computer crash, he decided to blow off steam with a road trip. It took one visit to plot a life change. “I’m a risk-taker anyway,” he says, “and I had grown to find city life abhorrent. As soon as I saw the Mattole Valley, I realized this was the kind of place where I had always wanted to live.”
He rented for a few years, then bought a house on a dead-end street with just three other homes. In more, ah, decorative hands, Young’s place could be cute. It’s got high, exposed wood ceilings, lots of south-facing windows, and a large open area that serves as a kitchen/dining/living room with one corner reserved for his office. In Young’s hands, however, the house is dusty and cluttered. Everywhere you look, against the walls and especially around the 1970s-era sofa, are piles of yellowing cardboard boxes. Most are filled with old, processed race results. Stacks of unprocessed results sit on his work table awaiting his perusal for the “treasure” or two they may contain, pearls for the database. The other boxes contain supplies, including crates of sports drink and empty kitty litter containers he uses to collect sea water. There’s a towering structure of huge white-vinegar bottles for pickling beets, and the bathroom cabinets are piled high with tins of canned food. Young feels a kindred connection to his two cats, Grunt-Grunt and Blondie. (In his yard, a small stone memorial notes, “Here lies Samantha, faithful companion.”) “Cats aren’t always sociable or appreciative,” he says. “You don’t own a cat. They just agree to live with you. I can identify with that.”
Rural living satisfies Young’s bedrock values of self-sufficiency and community. He grows much of his own food in a greenhouse and in a couple dozen mini garden beds that literally encircle his house, a patch of beans here, a few rows of kale there. He has solar panels on the roof and every winter makes his own salt by evaporating Pacific Ocean water on his wood stove. Cordwood is delivered to his driveway, and he hauls it to his patio for stacking. The second value, community, appears a contradiction, especially when you consider his decision to live in the remote Lost Coast. I ask Young, who’s twice divorced, if he could be considered a hermit. He scoffs. “Maybe, but that’s just because city people don’t know anything about country living,” he says. “Out here, we might not live close together, but our lives are interconnected, and we all take care of each other. When I broke both wrists a couple of years ago [after tripping during a run], I had people dropping by to help me every day for weeks.”
In fact, he’s an active member of the Mattole Valley community. He started the Mattole Self Sufficiency Project and personally paid $20,000 for the first minting of silver coins, called “petols,” that locals can purchase as a hedge against inflation. He sold $15,000 worth in the first several months, and total sales have since climbed to more than 10 times that amount. A few local establishments and service-providers actually accept petols as currency. More area residents have bought the coins as a precious-metals hedge, or simply to support the quirky, independent ethos of the Lost Coast. The Self Sufficiency Project also promotes seed sharing, gardening, and the return of dairy and grain farms to the valley.
He’s been an unpaid running coach at area schools and held volunteer positions with the Mattole Grange, the Mattole Valley Historical Society, and the Mattole Valley Community Center. His dogmatism isn’t always appreciated. He sat for a while on the board of the Mattole Restoration Council, but wasn’t reelected. “I suggested that if we’re supposed to restore stuff, we should incorporate actual science, set some priorities and measure our progress.” He shrugs. “They didn’t seem to agree.”
On a Saturday afternoon, Young and I busy ourselves preparing for a dinner party. We begin outdoors by picking the best potatoes, lettuce, and rhubarb from his gardens. Next we turn our attention indoors; this doesn’t go so smoothly. I’m assigned to clean the sunroom, which has old clothes hanging from the rafters, spider webs in all corners, and a mix of grit, grime, and broken glass shards on the floor. I do the best I can. Then Young and I move a table into the room and scrounge through the house for a half-dozen mismatched chairs. We are pleased by our effort.
Not so the first womenfolk who arrive. They want a tablecloth. And candles. And, really, the table should be closer to the kitchen. Young doesn’t mind the changed vision, or at least he doesn’t protest. He’s having trouble enough boiling down the rhubarb, intended to be the meal’s highlight when it’s lightly sweetened and served over tapioca for dessert.
Soon, we’re eating pasta, chicken, steamed vegetables, and salad, with beer and wine. Young himself doesn’t drink alcohol. “It costs too much, and makes you feel bad later” is one of his many nutritional takes. Another: Tabasco sauce and turmeric are essential food groups. He doesn’t use turmeric as a seasoning or take it in capsules; he swallows one teaspoon every day. “It tastes like dirt,” he observes. This is not a value judgment.
The conversation begins with who’s healthy and who’s not, who’s getting divorced or remarried, and who’s going where on vacation. Then the chatter takes a distinct Mattole Valley twist on the subjects of marijuana and poor Jose, the propane delivery guy. Marijuana is a big cash crop here, and everyone seems to be an expert on it, particularly its medicinal benefits. By dinner’s end, I’m almost convinced the plant could solve the healthcare crisis. I’m also feeling empathy for poor Jose. It seems that a feisty local spinster fired a rifle shot over his head when she was drunk. Jose wants to do his job, but, sheeesh, this is getting ridiculous.
Privacy, guns, marijuana, and every known form of independent living is the norm here. “But we’re not all the same,” says Young. “We’re very different. There are geniuses here, and great artists, and master gardeners, and Carnegie Hall musicians. The thing we have most in common is that we don’t like it much out there.”
Youngs body art and running log reflect his love of Japanese culture, a leg injury ended the running streak Young had begun in 1971. In December 2013, he launched a new streak, and I joined him for a five-miler on day 543. The start of our run is the strangest I’ve ever experienced. From the end of his driveway, we turn right, run 20 yards, then whirl 180 degrees to continue in the opposite direction. I’ve encountered plenty of turnarounds in the middle of out-and-back courses, but at the beginning? I’m too bemused to ask why, but several weeks later I email Young for an explanation. It comes back too dense and technical for ready explication (which describes a fair amount of Young’s communications). But the essence is this: “I wanted a course that finished at the driveway, with mile splits accurate to within a meter.”
On the road, Young is feeling the effects of his recent bodywork. His left leg and arm are scrabbling their way forward with an awkward catch-and-pull, catch-and-pull, and we’re barely moving. This doesn’t stop him from having a goal. “I’m aiming for sub-15s,” he announces. “There’s no guarantee of a tomorrow, so I figure I should put myself on the line every day. Besides, it will help me get back in shape.” Young was racing half marathons in about 2:10 before he fell in early 2015 during a run, breaking a rib and twisting a knee (injuries that did not interrupt his current streak). His body has been tight ever since, making it hard to run. Yet he appears unbothered by the chasm between goals and realities. He just aims for the highest rung.
I ask if he’s worried that his push-the-pace strategy could backfire, causing more injury. It seems an important question, one worth contemplation. Not for Young. He spits back instantly. “So what’s the alternative? To have your tissues soaked in formaldehyde and preserved in a lab? No, thanks. Not for me.”
Young holds himself to a high standard, and demands the same of others—at least of races and record keepers. This often pits him against the establishment.
In 1981, for instance, when Alberto Salazar and Allison Roe set world bests (back then, they weren’t called “world records”) on a previously certified New York City Marathon course, race organizers jubilantly publicized the runners’ accomplishments. Young took a different stance, in effect: Hold on a minute. A world best is a pretty big deal. We need to re-measure the course to make sure it was accurate as run on race day. He says his argument fell mostly on deaf ears, and more than three years passed before a record validation was conducted. When completed, it found the 1981 course to be just over 157 yards short. As a result, neither Salazar nor Roe appears on the ARRS list of marathon world record holders.
Grete Waitz’s several fastest-ever marathon performances in New York don’t appear on the ARRS marathon record list, either, because of the same course shortfall. Young adds that the New York City Marathon course fails another ARRS requirement, established in the mid-1980s, that dictates the acceptable distance between start and finish lines. The distance between New York’s start and finish is too great—more than 30 percent. To be precise, it’s about 12.5 miles, or 48 percent of the total race distance.
This particular ARRS rule cuts to the heart of road-race record keeping. Maintaining track records for distance events is easy: the races are flat, they start and finish in the same place (or nearly so), and the winds cancel out (except in sprints). On the other hand, road races can start and finish anywhere. Should someone be allowed to set a record on a course by running down a mountain? Reasonable minds could agree the answer is no. The same minds could not, however, agree on a solution. What about courses like the Boston Marathon, which is both point-to-point (an advantage in times of tailwinds) and a net downhill? When Joan Benoit ran 2:22:43 at Boston in 1983, was that a world record?
Problems like this were made for Ken Young. He ran statistical analyses on courses with varying amounts of net drop and found those that fell more than one meter per kilometer gave runners an advantage. He also created a computer model to estimate the effects of wind on performance. From that, he concluded point-to-point courses should have a start/finish separation no more than 30 percent of the total race distance. Young and a colleague each found that routes with a 30 percent start/finish difference had only a slight advantage over looped courses. However, when the difference extended to 50 percent, the advantage was much greater. So they drew the line at 30 percent.
Young’s solutions were so airtight that most races and record keepers accepted them—it simply made no sense to allow records from courses that ran down mountains or had hurricane-like tailwinds. That said, he’s not popular in Boston, where the course drops 3.23 meters per kilometer, and the start and finish are 91 percent apart. When Geoffrey Mutai ran a stunning 2:03:02 with a strong tailwind at the 2011 Boston Marathon—the prior fastest 26.2 was 2:03:59—his time wasn’t considered a “world record,” just the fastest marathon ever run. Since then, Dennis Kimetto has run 2:02:57 on the record-eligible, looped Berlin Marathon course, where the start and finish are roughly two percent apart.
In 2002, more than 30 years after Young began his work, the International Association of Athletic Federations finally took enough interest in road running to adopt rules for record keeping. Young’s system was the most precise and widely acknowledged, so the IAAF put it to a vote. It failed. The IAAF instead decided that road races could have starting lines and finish lines as much as 50 percent apart. Young still grumbles about it. “That was a ridiculous move the IAAF made; it was purely political,” he says. “There was a very influential Japanese delegate on the committee, and he wanted to protect several Japanese courses. If a sport wants to be serious about record keeping, it should use a completely independent body.” (Consequently, Grete Waitz’s NYC Marathon world bests are recognized by the IAAF.)
Hows he doing? I ask Harestad to go, Young edges slightly ahead of me, quickening the pace. We’re running between rolling hills dotted by grazing cattle, and we haven’t seen a car or another person for more than an hour. “We’re a little over 15:00s,” he says, glancing at his watch, “but we can still dip under if we push it a little.”
So we do, returning to his driveway, and not a meter farther, in a handful of seconds under 75 minutes. Young heads straight for the kitchen table, where his training log awaits. It’s just sheets of lined legal paper on a clipboard filled with cryptic markings that include Japanese characters—after serving two years as a U.S. Air Force meteorologist in Okinawa in the early 1960s, Young has had a lifelong fascination with Japanese culture, which explains his extensive body ink. Split times, final times, stats, and comments are all organized and neatly recorded in rows.
I ask why he doesn’t use some form of digital storage for his log. After all, that’s what he does with the world’s biggest and most important trove of road-race results. “My personal running data means too much to me for that,” he says. “Am I willing to risk a hard-drive crash? No way. Do I want to use the cloud, where the CIA can check me out? Not a chance.”
Huh? CIA?
It’s tempting to stereotype Young as some sort of backwoods, survivalist, arch-conservative whack job, but simplistic labels don’t cut it. Yes, he’s a Ph.D. atmospheric physicist who largely dismisses the human influence on global warming—“Climate changes regardless of what human beings do. Get used to it,” he says—but he also supports Bernie Sanders. He answers my question before I can ask it. “I’m a member of the GDI party,” he says. “I’m a God Damned Independent.”
At about 8 p.m., Young sits at his computer and peruses his ARRS to-do list. He has already spent two hours in the morning working, and another several hours in midafternoon. He’ll stick it out now until midnight, maybe 1 a.m. In total, it’ll be about half the hours he usually works. First, to the emails. He has messages from race directors, the media, his global correspondents, and 65-year-old grandfathers wondering where they could set an age-group record for the 15K. “I can never keep up,” he sighs. “Computers and the internet have made this job so much easier than it used to be, but the number of races and runners has grown exponentially. I’m going as hard now as I was 30 years ago.”
While Young answers emails, Grunt-Grunt slips into his lap. Young is ready for this. He reaches for the comb resting next to his keyboard and gently tugs it through Grunt-Grunt’s fur. Multitasking.
Soon the work grows tedious. Young has moved on to the serious stuff, the record keeping. Now he has to burrow from file to file to verify times, course distances, records for different countries, dates of birth, and which of the running world’s two David Kiplagats just ran that fast time. Work that makes his shoulders tighten, his eyes dry, his vision blurry.
Few dream of spending a lifetime in data entry. Young certainly never did. Yet here he is, still manually entering road-race results. “It took me a long time, but I eventually realized that this is my life path,” he says. “Some higher consciousness directed me here. I’m good at it, it feels right, and I’m helping people set high goals and go after them. I’m doing what I was meant to do.”
